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This little box could help you save on your electric bill. Similar to many smart thermostats like Nest and Honeywell Lyric, this smart device helps you control how you use electricity for heat. In this case, it is not how you heat your house but rather how you heat the water in your hot tub.

The math is quite obvious. While connecting devices to the Internet might seem to increase the total demand for power, this is rapidly offset by using electricity more efficiently. For example, this little box consumes less than a Watt of power while preventing a 10kW heater from running on cold nights or when the spa is not in use for long periods.

In The Internet of Spas, I briefly explained how commodity IoT hardware could be used to connect a (dumb) spa to the Internet, using the empty RJ-45 port found on most Balboa spa controllers.

At that time, I only had the opportunity to connect the port to a logic analyzer to see the kind of messages the controller was sending. In a way, I could understand the current status of the spa but not control it remotely. In this post, I will document the complete interface and how you can control the various features similar to the Top Side display interface.

Somewhere in my yard, there is an appliance which is not connected to the Internet... yet. Last summer, after a power outage, I realized the pumps were not working. The heater was running, but without water circulating the spa went quickly in Overheat mode, throwing errors on the top display. As it was summer and being a lot outside, I had plenty of time to notice the issue and not worry about freezing conditions.

Being out of warranty, I decided to cut the power to the spa and open the control box. This is where I discovered a Cal Spa CS6200DV branded Balboa circuit board, with SSID 100 66 45. Going through standard components, I noticed a blown out 30A fuse that was feeding the pumps. Replaced the fuse, powered back the spa, everything worked for a total of 2,95$.

Wondering how I could have remotely caught this issue, I started searching the web for a WiFi remote or RF option to the spa. While I noticed a WiFi Balboa bridge, it didn't seem to fit my need or even be compatible. It also needed a paid cloud membership and was well overpriced.Continue reading "The Internet of Spas"Categories: Arduino, ESP8266, IoT | 0 Comments

I have been using the great ESP-01 for a while now, either as a side WiFi chip for software running on various Atmel AVR chips (ATmega328, ATtiny84, ATtiny85) or as a standalone micro controller. While what you can do with an ESP8266 is impressive, it also has its drawbacks: it uses a lot of power.

If you are using batteries to power your project, you need to make sure you can sleep the WiFi chip most of the time or use a different less power hungry radio, like the various RFM69 chips. However, using something different than WiFi also means you need some kind of receiver.

If you are building gadgets for IoT, you will eventually need a way to connect to the Internet. Having WiFi directly on the gadget saves an extra step.

Two years ago, I decided to buy a Budweiser Red Light to enhance our hockey night experience. While the product is quite expensive for what it does, I couldn't be happier with the end result. You have to admit, every goal from your team feels and sounds worth jumping around shouting loudly.

This being said, while the product by itself is great, I couldn't resist the urge to hack it. One of my goal was to connect the house Hue lights to the Red Light so that they would shine red as goals were scored. Googling around, I found some ways of achieving this:

You should go read the article, as it points out why plastic seats are indeed the way to go in subways. I'm wondering if the seats in the AMT trains suffer from the same contamination.
Categories: Photography | 0 Comments